So Far So Good
The School of American Ballet is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. So is George Balanchine’s iconic “Serenade”—the first piece he made in America in 1934, choreographed on students from his brand-new academy.
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Sound Effect
Sometimes there’s not much you’re able to say analytically about a dance work, and yet you know you’ve just witnessed a blood-guts-and-soul offering from an artist of the keenest kinaesthetic intelligence. Such was the case with gizeh muñiz vengel’s “auiga,” second on a double bill finale for the ARC Edge residency at San Francisco’s CounterPulse.
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Hope is Action
The Australian Museum Mammalogy Collection holds ten specimens of the Bramble Cay Melomys collected from 1922–24, when they were in abundance. One hundred years later, a familiar photo of a wide-eyed, mosaic-tailed Melomys, the first native mammal to become extinct due to the impacts of climate change, greets me as I enter the Arts House foyer.
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Common Language
Pre-pandemic, queerness and ballet were two terms not often put together. So, when choreographer Adriana Pierce started bringing a community of queer-identifying people together on Zoom—cis women, trans people of all genders, and nonbinary dancers—it felt like a watershed moment for many of them.
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Living Doll
Watching Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Coppélia,” which the Seattle company generously released as a digital stream for distant fans, you could easily fall down two historically rewarding rabbit holes.
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Hammer Time
There was a series of warnings that led up to the moment it all fell apart, but no-one listened. Everything appeared to follow a linear trajectory, an illuminated, diagonal path that led straight to the suspended glass orb at the foot of the stage.
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A Fourth Jewel
If, as George Balanchine once so famously pronounced, “Ballet is woman,” then director and choreographer Lincoln Jones showed off the gals in his troupe, American Contemporary Ballet (ACB), to great effect in his world premiere, “Sapphires.”
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Founding Fathers, Visionary Vignettes
Dance asks much of its spectators: there is a need for the intellectual side to work in tandem with the visceral. Which is why Yorke Dance Project's glorious film Dance Revolutionaries is a triumph from top to bottom—it's a feast for the senses. Filmed in various locations during the pandemic, there is as much to sate the casual dance fan as an aficionado. Director David Stewart has created a multifaceted work.
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Dream On
How do we love Highways Performance Space? Let us count the ways! Indeed, a longtime nucleus for experimental theater, dance and art, the intimate black box venue in Santa Monica was the scene of a 35th anniversary celebration over the weekend.
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Summer with Alvin Ailey
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater held a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week.
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Life and Afterlife
In a willingness to explore the mythologies of the afterlife, I find my way to the last of a handful of seats for Melanie Lane’s “Arkadia” at the Substation.
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Adjacent Meanings
“Law of Mosaics” is a great title, and one that would befit almost any dance by the deconstructivist choreographer Pam Tanowitz. It just so happens that it belongs to the third ballet she has made for the New York City Ballet, and it stems from its Ted Hearne score.
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Teenage Angst and Institutions
Watching Matthew Bourne's reworked version of the “star-cross'd lovers,” I was briefly reminded of Veronica, played by Winona Ryder, in the dark 1988 comedy by Daniel Waters and Michael Lehmann, Heathers, and her line, “my teen angst bullshit has a body count.” Yes, this is the darker side of Bourne's repertoire,...
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The Me of Today
The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky reflects on the war in Ukraine, the connection between geopolitics and ballet, and joining the house of Balanchine.
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Beneath blue California skies, manicured trees, and the occasional hum of an overhead airplane, Tamara Rojo took the Frost Amphitheater stage at Stanford University to introduce herself as the new artistic director of San Francisco Ballet.
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America, F**K Yeah
After a week of the well-balanced meal that is “Jewels”—the nutritive, potentially tedious, leafy greens of “Emeralds,” the gamy, carnivorous “Rubies,” and the decadent, shiny white mountains of meringue in “Diamonds”—the New York City Ballet continued its 75th Anniversary All-Balanchine Fall Season with rather more dyspeptic fare.
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Acosta Danza’s Choreographic Soup
An “Ajiaco” is a type of soup common to Colombia, Cuba, and Peru that combines a variety of different vegetables, spices, and meats.
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